Monthly Archives: June 2014

I usually advise couples that I work with to not watch Channel 4’s One Born Every Minute (“OBEM”). It’s often fear that prevents a woman’s body from getting on with the job of easily birthing a baby and I reckon that OBEM with its dramatic births probably adds to that fear.

So, there I am last night, on my way home from a HypnoBirthing class, and my phone is pinging away. It seems that various people want me to know that HypnoBirthing is on OBEM. My husband is very surprised that the first thing I do when I get home is click on C4+1 to watch last night’s programme.

It was obvious from the very first scene featuring Kate & Ollie that they were HypnoBirthing. As they approached the labour ward reception, it was Ollie who spoke to the receptionist, it was Ollie arranging the environment and it was Ollie who was managing the situation to meet his wife’s needs. This was, perhaps unfairly, contrasted with the situation next door where the birthing mother was having to take care of her partner who didn’t seem to know what to do with himself.

I love how Kate and Ollie made the room their’s. They moved the furniture around and laid mats on the floor so that they could settle down together. Ollie helped to guide Kate through her breathing and tended to her needs. As she calmly went through the first stage of labour, her midwife spent much of her time in the staff room. Kate then became away that the baby’s head was reached the perineum and was ready to be born. Kate chose to be on all fours and the baby was born easily. Kate had lots of skin-to-skin time with Baby India who was then passed to Ollie for more skin-to-skin time whilst Kate birthed the placenta.

I am so pleased that OBEM chose to show a good birth – a birth where mum was calm, dad had a role that he relished, the baby arrived gently to skin-to-skin time with mummy and daddy whilst the midwife had little to do. I’m not sure that you can ask for more than that. Thank you OBEM for showing this birth and thank you to Kate and Ollie for letting so many expectant mums see the birth. I hope that this will be the start of showing births that help expectant mums to look forward to a calmer easier birth.

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During HypnoBirthing Sessions we discuss what happens once your baby is born. One of the first things that happens is that your midwife will give your baby an APGAR score.

The APGAR Test was designed by Virginia Apgar, an American anaesthesiologist, to quickly evaluate a newborn’s physical condition and to determine whether any extra medical help is required. Conveniently for midwifery students, the word Apgar makes a handy mnemonic detailing the signs to be assessed: Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, and Respiration.

The Apgar Score is usually assessed twice: once at 1 minute after birth, and again at 5 minutes after birth. Sometimes, if there are concerns about the baby’s condition or the score at 5 minutes is low, the test may be scored for a third time at 10 minutes after birth.

Five factors are used to evaluate the baby’s condition and each factor is scored on a scale of 0 to 2, with 2 being the best score:

appearance (skin coloration)

pulse (heart rate)

grimace response (medically known as “reflex irritability”)

activity and muscle tone

respiration (breathing rate and effort)

You midwife will give each of these signs a score from 0 to 2 and total them up to give your baby a score out of 10, with 10 being the best score.

Most mums who have had an easy calm birth and who have a clearly healthy newborn baby will want to have immediate skin to skin contact; it can be a good idea to mention on your birth preferences that you would like the APGAR score to be assessed whilst your baby remains on your chest, rather than being whisked away to a table that you can’t necessarily see. Of course instinctively, everyone is assessing whether your baby is a ‘clearly healthy newborn baby’ by looking at the signs that make up the APGAR score.

Here’s hoping your baby gets a high score in the first test of their lives!